The critical stands regarding the "authenticity" of the Shroud are basically two: refusal and possibilism.. After the above mentioned scientific discoveries, refusal rests only on prejudice or set purpose, i.e. the antiscience par excellence. And in a dialectical forum it lacks that basic rationality and those obvious rules of formal logic that don't allow denying the evidence and asserting what is absurd, without which rules any discussion in good faith is quite impossible.

If even a single one of the characteristics of the Shroud image cannot be the work of men, one should honestly bow to the mistery of supernatural. Now, as we have seen, there are at least two of such properties, namely photo negativity and 3D message, it is the science, not the faith to state it. Even letting the first pass, every hypothesis on the origin of the Shroud image different from the Christological one must from now onward be confronted with the 3D message, and if incompatible with, be simply but firmly rejected. And till to-day, those who "refuse" the Shroud haven't be able to produce any hypothesis capable to pass the test.

As to possibilism, it's more or less the official stand of the Catholic Church. But at the present stage of researches, the mental reservations about the authenticity of the Shroud, i.e. the "it might" and "it could" of its traditional caution in affaires of the kind, and perhaps also its awe of the science, should be set aside. The fact is that just the science in capital letters - we'll never be bored to repeat it - has "authenticated" the Shroud by recognizing itself powerless to break through its image. If it should be capable to disclose the mistery in the future - something hinted at in the final issue of the STURP -, we were ready to humbly admit that we were wrong.

But till then...

Here the story has come to the end.It still remains to go back to the mentioned, singular likeness that binds somehow together the Turin Shroud and the Rosetta Stele. As the "reading" of the Shroud has brought again to life after twenty centuries the visage of Jesus, so did the deciphering of the hieroglyphics carved on black basalt with the esoteric world of the Pharahos. This happened thanks to the prodigious flair of that true genius of Champoillon de Figeac, not yet in his thirty. But the likeness goes not further. In fact, Champoillon happened to discover in that stele in 1820 what he might have discovered two or perhaps ten centuries before, had he then only come on it, since the sole tools needed to the purpose were his talent and his unlimited education. Not so for the Turin linen cloth. No one Champoillon, Leonardo da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola or Einstein lived before the XX century could have discovered on it the signs of supernaturality, for the tools to the task - from the camera to the electronic elaboration of images - hadn't yet been invented. This leeds us to ask thoughtfully ourselves, whether the mistery of the Turin image was not assigned since the beginning to the homo informaticus of 2000, the only human being capable to decode it. If so, we'd find ourselves to face new challenges and new unknown themes of work, anyway quite different from those of the past.

Fig. 10: the representation of the flagellation of Christ carried by two soldiers by the flagrum(Source: image from the movie "The Passion of Christ")